Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Annie
Nico quite rudely and unceremoniously throws me over his shoulder and sprints through Savannah to get back to our house.
Just kidding.
I wish.
Instead, after dragging me out of the clatter of dinner and stepping into the thick, honey-slow air of Savannah at night, Nico takes one look around, gently takes my hand, and begins a romantic stroll.
I hate it.
Lie.
“This is nice,” he says.
“This is awful.”
He swats my ass.
More, I want to say.
“This is some beautifully mundane shit, Annie. Enjoy it with me before I break your back.”
Despite the persistent flood in my panties, Nico is right, unfortunately.
It’s quiet now, the kind of hush that blankets the city when it’s too dark for tourists and too early for ghosts.
We wander past wrought-iron fences and crooked cobblestone paths, under the draping canopies of ancient live oaks.
The streets shine faintly under the glow of old gas lamps, amber pools of light flickering across cobblestones slick with humidity.
“I love the Spanish moss,” I offer, nodding towards where it drapes over most visible tree branches, swinging like whispers in the slight breeze. “Soft, secretive, sacred.”
Nico stops us under a huge clump of it on the branch of a massive oak and swings me around to face him.
He’s wearing a lazy smile, his eyes shining with something that looks like affection.
He starts tracing the lines of my face with his fingers—god, those fingers—across each eyebrow, down the length of my nose, across my mouth. It’s all too much.
“You are disgustingly handsome,” I blurt out, and I almost regret it, expecting that arrogant smirk, but instead I get a grin that seems like it’s just for me. Soft, secretive, sacred. Enchanted.
Somehow, in the span of almost seven days, my worst enemy has made nasty, problematic, selfish Annie Li feel enchanting.
“Dance with me under the moonlight, Annie Li,” he says, and girl, you are so fucked.
I step into my rightful place, the place he’s made for me, a place that’s strong yet pliant, that can accommodate my force field of spikes and knives and swords and other manners of sharp things—not that they’ve come out around him, lately.
Wrapped up tight, his arms squeezing my entire torso, my forehead tucked against his chin—my place, I realize, is in Nico Giannuzzi’s arms.
I experience another moment of sheer panic at this, the fortieth in two hours.
The first being earlier, at Nico’s allusion to “the rest of our lives.” At how, in the span of five days, I’d gone from “I’m going to kill this asshole” to “I want to spin in slow circles while hugging him under the moonlight.” At two thick fingers breaking Sister Annie’s two-year-long vow of celibacy, two days short of the goal.
At being a miserable hurricane of serious issues—
Nico presses his lips to mine, and all panic is entirely replaced by gooey warmth and a sense of belonging.
This kiss is different from the others. This is a worship of my mouth, a tender caress, a slow drag and dance of our tongues, my jaw reverently cradled in a big hand.
It’s one that says, I’ve got you, Annie Li. I see you, and I want you.
I’m wholly unfamiliar with this feeling. Of safety and security and something else. I am unmoored.
I take his bottom lip between my teeth and tug, trying to ramp it up and move it along. Get to the good stuff. Detour around this other stuff I don’t want to, cannot get into.
But he knows. He knows what I’m trying to do and is unbothered. He takes my hand and drops a kiss on the pointer and middle fingers, directly on top of the spade and the heart, before looping his fingers through mine and continuing our leisurely moonlit stroll.
“Can we pick up the pace?” I attempt.
“Crawfish,” he answers merrily. “I didn’t tell you about the crawfish. That’s the fun part, but it’s where people really fuck up.”
“Tell me more about fucking and upping.”
“Be good, Annie,” he chastises gently. “I’ll give it to you if you’re good,” and then my brain shuts down and enters Overachiever Autopilot so that I can not only be good, but will also be the best.
“Okay.”
He cuts a glance down towards me in contemplation. Then he leans down.
“Look at you, beautiful girl. Much, much better,” he breathes into my ear, and I trip over a crack in the sidewalk.
Nico catches me and moves me into the dark, presses me against one of those wrought iron fences so it cuts into my back with just the right amount of pain.
“Data collection,” he explains, before sliding his hand down the front of my shorts and into my underwear and gliding his fingers between my lips.
He chuckles, dragging back and forth in a sopping wet slide while all but holding me up with his other arm.
“Noted,” he muses while pressing the hard length of himself against my hip.
I grip onto his arm with my nails like an actual cat in heat when he tries to pull away. “No, please, Nico,” I whine, and great. I’m now a whiner and a beggar along with being a giggler.
However, this does something for Nico. I feel it in the way he gets even harder against my hip and thrusts.
“Say it again, Annie,” he grunts.
I’m all but climbing him now, grinding myself along his fingers and using my hand around his neck for leverage. “Please, Nico, please. I need you.” I don’t recognize this voice. “I need you now. I need you to fill me up. It hurts.”
“Fuck,” he hisses. “You’re even prettier when you beg.” He gives me a finger in reward, slides it in and up and out and in, and I swallow a shout. “Even more when you’re dripping all over my hand.”
Yelling, then laughter, from the other side of the fence.
Nico looks up and around, collecting some more data while knuckle deep inside me. “Shit,” he reports. He pulls his hand out and licks his finger. “Fuck the romance. Fuck the crawfish.” He starts dragging me down the path. “Time to break your back, honey.”
We barely make it through the front door. We do not make it past the foyer.
Between the hot thrusts of tongues and groping, searching hands, Nico drags us down to our knees immediately after slamming the front door shut. He whips a hand under my thighs, manhandling my body to lay me on my back so he can rip my shorts and my panties down in one particularly aggressive drag.
“Shirt off,” he says, reaching back to pull off his own. “Shirt and bra off, Annie, then use those two favorite fingers of mine to spread those lips and show me where it hurts.”
I do as I’m told because I’m being so good, laying back and planting my feet and making a ‘v’ of my pointer and finger to spread myself where I’m aching.
“God, Annie, fuck,” he groans. “There she is,” he says, his eyes dragging the length of my body in reverence.
“You are the most beautiful fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen.
” As if he can’t help it, he tugs the waistband of his boxers and those fucking athletic shorts that have been haunting my nightmares for days and hooks them right under his balls.
I lose my mind at the image of him like this, of him looming above me on his knees and impossibly large in a leisurely, stroking hand.
Girl, you are so fucked. “Nico,” I wheeze out, grinding on emptiness. “Please.”
He plants a hand on the floor and leans down, licking the tops of my fingers on either side of my pussy, right on top of the spade, then the heart, his tongue just grazing where I need it most. He groans again. “I’ll give you anything you want if you beg for it like that.”
He spits on my clit, right at the apex of my fingers, and I shouldn’t like this as much as I do, even more so when he mutters, “mine,” before going to fucking town.
The first drag of his tongue is animalistic, a blistering slide that splits my flesh down the middle. An inhuman sound leaves my throat, at this first oral contact in two years, somewhere between a screech and a gasp, and my hand flies to cover my mouth before Nico swats it away.
“Nuh uh,” he chastises. “Loud, Annie. I wanna hear how I’m making it better.”
Fine, then.
I receive a satisfied rumbling from deep in his chest. Both my hands immediately fly into his hair as he tosses both my legs over his shoulders.
“Yes, baby,” he grits out in between wet laves and circles and sucks, “Grind that sweet pussy all over my face,” and I realize that my hips are moving on their own accord as I try to chase my third non-self induced orgasm in over two years.
“Fingers, please, Nico,” I gasp, needing that stretch, and he obliges with two that move right to the spot he’s already located with a scientist’s precision and rubs.
Hard. “Oh, fuck,” I breathe, as the wave starts to build from the base of my spine.
“Oh god. Nico. Here it—” I am interrupted by a brutal suck to my clit, then the wave swells and then crashes, exploding into a million pinpricks of confetti and white noise.
When I open my eyes, Nico is again looking down at me with that look in his face. The one of reverence, or awe, or maybe devotion.
And again, a sound tears out of me. It bubbles up from deep in my gut and bursts into the air, something between a laugh and a cry, too full of joy to be just one or the other.
He grins, kissing up my body, following a line of tattoos up—the tiger on my belly, the butterfly on my sternum, the hickey from earlier, then lays the side of his head against my chest, his ear against my heart, lays the full weight of his body on mine while I wrap my arms around his head and try to catch my breath.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Thank me later,” he says, then, “I’m just getting started.”
He hauls me up onto my feet, spears his hands through my hair and his tongue into my mouth, walking me backwards with slow steps towards what I assume is the kitchen. “Now,” he says in between kisses, “is a good time to tell me what you want for your first dicking down in two years.”